Language subtag modification request: frr Suppres-Script Latn

[Doug Ewell]

Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote:

> And who has come to the registry with this concern? English can't be
> issued a "Suppress-script". I have many texts in English in other
> scripts: In Runic, in Tengwar. I have a book all about writing
> English in Cyrillic.

Those situations are not what Suppress-Script is all about.  I think you 
may have missed the point on this.

Suppress-Script says that when you are dealing with the most common 
case -- the script that is used to write a particular language an 
overwhelming majority of the time, like Latin for English -- that use of 
the script subtag is not recommended.  In other words, in the normal 
case, "en" is preferred over "en-Latn".

Suppress-Script has nothing to do with cases like "en-Runr" or "en-Teng" 
or "en-Cyrl", or for that matter "pt-Arab".  All of those tags are 
perfectly fine, not discouraged in any way, and in fact they can be used 
right off the shelf without need for individual registration, thanks to 
the new rules.  If you have a need to distinguish English in Latin from 
English in Runic, you can also use "en-Latn" alongside "en-Runr". 
There's nothing wrong with that; the script subtag in "en-Latn" adds 
information in this case.

All that Suppress-Script says is that when you are dealing a "normal" 
case like English in Latin or Portuguese in Latin, and not working with 
a "comparison" situation as above, the "Latn" script probably does not 
add information and should therefore be omitted.  This is similar to 
saying that the region subtag in "pon-FM" probably does not add 
information and should therefore be omitted.

> All of the scripts of the world are routinely transliterated into
> Latin, by the United Nations and other authorities. Therefore *no*
> language that primarily uses a non-Latin script is eligible for
> "Suppress-script". And in many countries of the world, names in the
> Latin script are routinely transcribed into non-Latin scripts. There
> are often standards for doing this.

Transcriptions and transliterations of Russian or Chinese into Latin, or 
French into Cyrillic or Han, can be tagged as "ru-Latn" or "zh-Latn" or 
"fr-Cyrl" or "fr-Hani".  These are perfectly fine, and they have nothing 
to do with Suppress-Script.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/